I have been running Spam Karma 2 Alpha on this site for the past few days and it seems much better at catching spam than the original Spam Karma including catching all the trackback spam that had been slipping through.
I was however missing the digest emails that Spam Karma generated so I wrote a little plug-in for Spam Karma 2 this evening “sk2_pjw_daily_digest_plugin“. This sends a digest email every n hours with a report on the recently caught spam (since last mail basically) much the same as you can see through the Spam Karma 2 plug-in options page.
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Category: Development
Anything and everything development related
Ajax – A new aproach to web appliations?
A lot of buzz has been generated recently by this essay by Jesse James Garrett about what he calls Ajax:
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
- standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
- dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
- data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
- asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
- and JavaScript binding everything together.
None of this is new technology, but rather the application of existing technology to provide a much better user experience to the user of a web application. Web applications are often see as poor second cousins to desktop applications in terms of user experience because of the continual slow round tripping to the web server to progress to the next step. “Ajax” as used by sites like Google’s gmail removes this poor user experience as the data for the next page is downloaded in the background while the user reads the current page.
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What does the beta in “beta software” really mean?
The is an interesting article on zdnet today entitled A long winding road out of beta. In the article Paul Festna comments on the fact that a lot of companies are now performing the Beta stage of software development in public and for a long period of time.
I think that Paul is missing the point here about what the Beta in “Beta Software” really means. I do agree that in the classic software development process the beta stage could be described some what like this:
The beta version, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, typically refers to the second stage of software testing. Traditionally distributed to a limited group of testers, it follows the alpha version, which is tested in the lab
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